


Fractal Flares

by ERNest



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Science, Gen, Mad Scientists, Pre-Canon, but the source material had a lot of dubious science too so possibly i made it make MORE sense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-12 23:09:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20164156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Ava should have been Eve. Still a palindrome, still finding echoes of herself forwards and back, but reaching for the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. With the world grown wicked, she searches for a cure or a connection or anything that might be considered good.





	Fractal Flares

Ava should have been Eve. Still a palindrome, still finding echoes of herself forwards and back, but reaching for the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. As long as she can remember, she’s been striving to learn more about the world she lives in, and now that it’s grown wicked, this drive of hers is more than mere curiosity. The human race has come face to face with catastrophe and survived, if only by leaving behind potter’s fields the size of cities. It will just keep getting worse because disaster breeds disaster.

The spores which choke the cells are the same as the fibrous growths which strangle the brain and airways, are the same as the vines which are sometimes known to reel bodies back into themselves when a Crank is far enough gone. But some of their best minds are looking into that, and so far it seems to be nothing more than a terrifying coincidence of blue cords and red knots.

There has to be a connection, that’s what would make sense, but either there’s a radical transformation from one phase to another, or it’s a staggering case of convergent evolution, because it’s simply not made of the same stuff – not chemically, not genetically, barely even structurally once you get past those searing colors. Ava stares at microscopes and computer screens until her eyes burn and finds herself closer to neither answer nor cure. Her migraines have been flaring up more often lately, but the work must be done.

They get reports of impossible children in every city, all from the generation born after the solar flares, who were exposed to the infection but somehow are not dead or even ailing. It’s not everyone, maybe one in ten thousand people can be confirmed Immune, but it’s something like hope when before there was only bafflement. Well. Looking at the data they are almost more bewildered than before. They find that siblings and sometimes cousins will share whatever quality helps them survive, but beyond that, nothing in their backgrounds or circumstances helps the researchers connect the dots. That is becoming a theme lately, things which look related but aren’t, even if that would make a lot more sense. But who ever said nature should make  _ sense _ ?

The department takes in all promising plague orphans and treat them well, even as they run countless tests and do everything anyone can think of, no matter how stupid it sounds. The sensible hypotheses haven’t yielded anything, after all. So, sure, they change the children’s diet and they monitor their heartrate and their brain activity and their hormone levels. They try sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation and memory modification, but while they know quite a lot now about human nature, they have no idea what sets  _ these _ humans apart from the rest.

The breakthrough comes when a fight flares up in the corridors. There’s no telling what started it – some comment taken the wrong way, the general strangeness of being in a sterile facility instead of with their families, or maybe it’s simply the frequency at which the fluorescent lights have been set to flicker this week. But it gets both boys – plus the crowd that gathers around them – pumping adrenaline like mad. The attendant who finally broke them up said the very air crackled with a feeling of fear and danger and rage. And something else.

The enzyme is unlike anything they’ve seen before, so no wonder they couldn’t identify it until stress created it in a high enough concentration that it couldn’t be missed even when they weren’t actively looking for it. But now that they know what it looks like even if they’re still not sure just what it  _ is _ , they run more tests on their subjects, and sure enough there are traces of the substance even in bodies at rest.

Any group as well-funded as Ava’s can have its fingers in many different pies. Well-dressed men wearing too-wide smiles walk into hospitals and clinics all over the country to request certain files. In the future, along with their annual shots, children will have their blood taken and analyzed. From the results of those tests, WCKD is compiling a database. The doctors know better than to ask questions; anything involving  _ that _ logo is above their paygrade. Besides, they may be shadowy and sinister, but they are ultimately working towards the preservation and betterment of humanity.

When their research analysts pull down the maps of the area and explain which population centers are most likely to yield suitable patients, their findings are presented in sensible black and white, crisp dotted lines clearly delineating points of interest. But when Ava closes her eyes to replay those briefings, she finds herself and her department as the beating heart at the center of a network of bloated blue lines carrying information, humans, and resources to and from their various nodes of influence. It may be worrying that some part of her casts the rest as a virus, but she prefers to think of what she does as a vaccination, and WCKD is good.

Now that they have enough blood from enough sources, they can begin their work in earnest. There has to be a serum, or a vaccine, or a daily dose of pills that can be used to fight this thing. If they can’t prevent it altogether, then maybe once it hits an individual, its progress can still be slowed or even stopped. At this early stage it is still too much to hope that they could reverse the Flare and shrink it back down to nothing.

The real trouble is that the enzyme can’t be produced synthetically, so they can’t just release these kids back into the wild. They need to stick around so they can keep producing something which might become salvation for some sample of the population. And their bodies won’t make more than trace amounts naturally, not without an impetus. They need to be terrified, and not just a little, either; there must be real belief in mortal danger. And at the height of emotion, awash with chemicals, they will be drained of everything useful, and then discarded.

And so WCKD builds a wall, one after another after another, until it’s a maze, a labyrinth, a map. They will discover where and how to poke at a young brain, the best ways to hurt someone to get the results they want. It is a massive endeavor staged on many different fronts, and it’s beautiful in its own way to see the path a mind might be forced to take, so she keeps its image on her wall.

There is perhaps something to be said for the conservation of resources, be that building materials, or not immediately stringing up the people from whom they want to harvest, but pointing that out is not her job. Her job is to make a cure out of whatever they get, no matter how it is acquired.

Eve, the first woman, the woman she will never be, was made from the rib of Adam. And those two, part of the same thing, created humanity from the ground up. All Ava can do is take from the bodies of these Immunes and attempt to stop humanity from ending. It’s hardly pastoral, certainly nowhere close to a Paradise, but she can do one thing. These children, now grown into teens, who contribute to a future they may never see, will at least get a garden before they go.

  
  



End file.
